What is Web 2.0 Long-Tail Marketing?

Everybody has heard of Web 2.0 and it’s represents the changes to the Internet brought on by the likes of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and blogs. And everyone is aware of the dominance of Google among the search engine providers. What you may not have heard of is long-tail marketing and the Internet Aggregators. Aggregators pull “products” together, one offer all in one spot on the web. For example, iTunes aggregates music, one offer to consumers. Google AdSense pulls publishers together, on offer to advertisers — in this case, the product is the Web site. Amazon is a massive aggregator of books, ebooks and retail in general.

Filtering Software such as Google completes the Supply And Demand cycle for consumers but to do so keywords connect the consumers to the corresponding URL. That URL is not just to a top-level domain such as Amazon to the myriad of other pages that exist at the site. Of course, some of those pages link to the book you are trying to sell.

What’s interesting about keywords is the distribution of popularity to a few chosen words as indicated in the graph below. The green section is a few keywords that immense popularity. Common words such books, movies, cigarettes etc. The yellow represents keywords that are less popular and with few hits in a given day. Keywords such as “A Fan’s Notes”, “Memento” and “Cambodian cigarettes.”

An example from Wikipedia of a power law graph showing popularity ranking. To the right in yellow, is the long-tail; to the left are the few keywords that dominate. Notice that the areas of both regions match yet most advertisers target the green which means more competition and higher cost to compete. Notice the opportunity in the yellow long-tail words.

Keywords that target genres in the green would be “romance novel” and there is a lot of competition to position well on a Google search return. BookIM targets the long-tail keywords; for example a costume romance set in the Renaissance would include such words as “renaissance romance” or “English renaissance romance”. Long-tail words such as these are the choice of targeted readers who are definitely interested in more than reading the latest Danielle Steele novel.

Done right, long-tail keyword research means finding targeted and motivated readers! It does so by quantifying total monthly searches plus projected conversions per keyword. This is part of proprietary BookIM formula that sets keywords genre searches. This also means we need to limit the number of authors we can support per giving genre. We can only dominates so many keywords and the limits are proprietary to BookIM.

So what do we do? Well, we work with you personally reviewing your book, and we only work with books and work with you to complete a proprietary keyword questionnaire that actually defines the long-tail opportunities.

Here’s the secret: we keep defining the long-tail keywords to drive the quality and quantity of perspective buyer to your book’s landing page.

eventually, BookIM will also become an aggregator, a Web 2.0 site for discriminating